Enjoy an evening of free opera, with exclusive backstage films, competitions and the best performances relayed live to the big screen. Bring a picnic and share the experience with friends, family, and the tens of thousands of people also watching from across the UK.

Costume PartyAn afternoon of free festival fun for the whole family on Saturday 11 July, with the chance to dress up in the Royal Opera House’s famous costumes, make your own outfits and accessories, meet the opera diva Carmen, watch the Firebird dance, and much more.

Events will take place from 12 noon across the High House Production Park site and will include activities with Kinetika, the High House Artists Studios, and The Backstage Centre. Refreshments will be available all day and there will be prizes awarded for the best selfies taken on the ‘virtual catwalk’ – participants can even gain their own Discover Arts Award. Wacky outfits welcome!

How many archivists does it take to change a lightbulb? Well, only one actually – but it takes a team effort to pack away objects of the historic ROH Collections, as we prepare to move the Costume, Furniture and Musical Instruments Collections from the current store in Dover to the new Bob and Tamar Manoukian Costume Centre in Thurrock. All the objects we’re moving must be stored to archival standards, to protect them from damage on the move and so prolong their lifespan.

The size, shape, material and conservation needs of an object are always taken in to consideration when deciding on how it is to be packed. Our many shoes are placed in archival boxes that have been lined with wadding and acid-free tissue paper. The wadding moulds the shoe and takes pressure off the side it is resting on. The space inside the shoes are carefully filled with small rolls of wadding, preserving the shape of the shoe and preventing new creases forming.

More unusual and large objects, such as a rat’s head mask from The Royal Ballet’s 2003 production of The Sleeping Beauty, are also placed in boxes lined with acid-free tissue paper. Puffs and rolls of acid-free tissue paper are placed around the item to minimize movement in the box during transportation and thus prevent damage to it.

Many of the costumes can be hung on hangers, which are then put inside bespoke Tyvek bags. There are over 2,000 costume bags on 155 rails to move. Some costume items, such as cloaks and robes, are too heavy to be hung so they are carefully packed away in to costume boxes. If the costume has to be folded to fit inside the box, rolls of tissue paper are placed in the folds to stop creases forming in the material.

A headdress designed by Cecil Beaton for the Covent Garden Opera Company 1963 production of Turandot proved to be a particular challenge. The headdress is stored on a mannequin head and is very large and fragile, with parts sticking out and hanging at all angles. The team had to show a bit of ingenuity to prepare it for transfer. This involved redesigning a box so that that the headdress was held fast during the move whilst at the same time protecting the delicate pendants.

The UAL-accredited BA (Hons.) course will be based at the Bob and Tamar Manoukian Costume Centre at High House Production Park in Thurrock and will focus on the cutting and making of costumes for opera, ballet, theatre, film and TV. Modules over three years will include hand sewing techniques, pattern cutting, garment construction, and the history of costumes throughout the years. Students will also get the opportunity to work with professionals from the Royal Opera House on costumes featuring in new Royal Ballet and Royal Opera productions.

Students will be taught how to make costumes that are lightweight and flexible for Royal Ballet dancers to perform in, as well as create costumes that are made to last many years as productions may remain in the ROH repertory for up to four decades. They will also learn how to make a range of different styles of costumes from leotards for contemporary ballets, to historically accurate costumes for opera productions set in specific periods of history.

‘This course is a fantastic example of industry and higher education coming together to invest in young people, training them alongside the very best professionals in their field, and giving them skills that employers so desperately need,’ says Alex Beard, Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House. ‘The skills the students will learn on this course will give them the foundation to work not only in opera and ballet, but also in theatre, film or fashion, expanding the job opportunities even wider for the graduates.’

As well as hosting the Costume Construction course, the Bob and Tamar Manoukian Costume Centre will also be home to more than 20,000 Royal Opera House costumes and wigs, as well as historic costumes from the ROH Collection. The High House Production Park is also home to the ROH’s Bob and Tamar Manoukian Production Workshop, the Backstage Centre, and High House Artists’ Studios.

The building of the Costume Centre is supported by Bob and Tamar Manoukian, European Regional Development Fund, Thurrock Borough Council, the Foyle Foundation, the Royal Opera House and South Essex College.

Managed by Creative & Cultural Skills on behalf of a consortium of employers and industry organizations including Live Nation, Royal Opera House, White Light and the Association of British Theatre Technicians, the new National College will provide specialist training in the technical skills needed by the creative and cultural industries. This is in response to significant development in the industry, with the creative economy growing at four times the rate of the national economy, and the value of the UK’s creative industries exports standing at over £15 billion per year.

With headquarters at The Backstage Centre in Thurrock, the National College will provide opportunities for students to train alongside the professionals who use The Backstage Centre to rehearse, record and film. The National College will specialize in the delivery of Creative Apprenticeships working with Creative & Cultural Skills' National Skills Academy network of training providers to deliver across the UK.

Business Secretary Vince Cable said: ‘The talent which brings plays, operas, and films to life on screen and stage is the driving force behind our world-leading creative sector. UK creative industries generate £71 billion in revenue each year and support 1.71 million jobs. It’s not something we’re just good at - we are the best in the world. We must continue to invest in the next generation of talent. That is why today I am proud to announce the National College for the Creative and Cultural Industries, which will train the technicians to support our country’s next award-winning directors, musicians and actors.’

Alex Beard, Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House and Chair of High House Production Park said: 'The creation of the National College at The Backstage Centre is a hugely important development in the breadth of opportunities now being offered from High House Production Park. We already have the Royal Opera House’s sets and scenery built on site, and the new Bob and Tamar Manoukian Costume Centre will open in September. To have such a concentration of professional craftspeople and training facilities for both students and professionals in backstage and technical skills in one place is unprecedented and will help enormously in equipping people with the right skills for jobs in the creative industries. It adds to what the Park can offer to Thurrock’s young people but will also be national resource for young people from across the country.’

Pauline Tambling, CEO, Creative & Cultural Skills, said: ‘This is a very exciting time for us all. There is an acknowledged shortage of highly qualified technical workers with hands-on industry experience, and there are rapid changes in the technology that technicians use to do their work. To be able to have a National College where we can train people in these often unseen skills, and to provide apprenticeships and industry experience, is absolutely vital.’

The Royal Opera House Bridge has now been in place for more than two years working to increase opportunities for children and young people in our region to connect with great arts and culture. We’ve been networking, co-investing, partnering and collaborating with schools and cultural organizations across Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, North Kent and Essex.

We wanted to take this moment to share some of our headlines. For example, did you know that we’ve worked with 72 young cultural ambassadors to help them develop links between their schools and cultural organizations? Or that we’re working with Kent County Council to commission arts and cultural providers to improve public health? And that we’ve driven over 13,000 miles and been on 286 train journeys to meet our partners in fish and chip shops, boats, living rooms and film studios?

Over the last year, we’ve invested in 12 new partnerships committing £291,000 to programmes including the ‘Inspire’ Programme in North Kent and Pop up Projects which reached 5,140 pupils in Canvey Island and Thurrock.

We’ve also worked with Portas Pilot towns, working with more than 75 local artists and creative organizations and resulting in over 17,000 residents taking part in local cultural activities.

We recognize the importance of collaborative networks and support organizations and so have invested in the Bedford Culture Network who are nurturing links between cultural and education providers to strengthen the overall provision in the area.

We’re excited about what the future holds for arts and culture across our region as we see an increase in doorstep opportunities for young people to engage with cultural learning. We are incredibly proud of our achievements so far, and you can read more about them in our Annual Review. I hope you enjoy reading more about our work, and finally, my thanks go to the Bridge team and all our partners for all their enthusiasm and hard work over the last two years.

Royal Opera House is one of 10 Bridges across England publicly funded by The Arts Council England over three years to help to connect children and young people with great art and culture.

The Costume Centre, which is due to open in 2015, will house more than 20,000 costumes for opera and ballet productions currently in repertory, as well as the Royal Opera House archive collection, which includes around six thousand items that date back to the 19th century.

Currently, Royal Opera House costumes are kept in locations across the UK, including Aberdare and Dover; the new centre in Thurrock will hugely reduce the carbon footprint of transporting costumes, as well as allowing for more efficient management and preservation of costumes still in use. The centre will also provide permanent workrooms for students, in partnership with South Essex College, and offer specialist placements with the Royal Opera House Costume Department.

‘With the completion of the Costume Centre, there will be outstanding facilities for costume production and training, as well as for historic costumes and the running costume stock of the Royal Opera House all on site,’ says Matt Lane, Head of ROH Thurrock and Thames Gateway. ‘We know that these incredible materials and spaces will inspire visitors, excite learners and offer new opportunities for even more people to engage with the creative industries’.

‘It's great to see the next site development getting underway. Businesses and learners alike feel inspired by the Park already, and they can't wait for the new centre to open its doors in 2015,’ says Andrea Stark, Chief Executive of the High House Production Park.

‘The new Costume Centre will be an exemplar in low carbon design,’ says Andrea. ‘In addition, alongside this building project, the Royal Opera House is running an innovative low carbon programme called Culture Change. This is helping many small companies and freelancers in our sector to increase their resilience by learning how to reduce their carbon footprint and improve their bottom line.’

To find out more about our work in Thurrock or join us for a tour of the Production workshop, visit our website.

This year’s FUSED Festival came to a close at the Backstage Centre in Thurrock with a powerful world premiere of A Little Thing Called Life. Created and performed by RM19 – the Royal Opera House Thurrock Youth Vocal Group – the piece took inspiration from the themes of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem, cleverly mixing singing, chanting, rap music and hip-hop with drumming, guitar playing, clapping and inventive staging. The 70 performers, many of them in their teens, delivered a compelling message about the feelings, desires, hopes and aspirations of young people.

Joshua Ridgway, performer, 14

'It was a great experience. I love performing. I used to do balletand have seen a few operas, but this was completely different from anything I’ve done. It’s good to come out of my shell and do what I love. And this took it to the next level. I was able to mix with so many different people. It was the best experience I’ve ever had.'

Aurora Barrett, performer, 15

'I’ve found lots of people here in Thurrock with the same sort of ambitions and fun personality that I have. I loved singing with them, and we made our own production! It was packed with all of our emotions, all of our feelings. We wanted to express how we felt towards different aspects of society. And although we may born in different communities or have different ethnicities, we are united in this society.'

James Green, performer, 15

'It was a brilliant experience. I performed in the circle, playing the djembe, an African percussion instrument. Being a musician, it’s great to be able to create ideas and get to perform them. It makes you feel happier to be doing that. It’s a lot more inspiring. It’s a great feeling knowing that you’ve written the piece, you’re performing it and you’re the one who is making it brilliant.'

Audrey Stowers, James’ great-aunt

'I’m so, so proud of James. It’s unbelievable what he’s doing. Tonight was lovely, really beautiful. I liked all of it, the music, the singing, the choreography. These programmes [by the Royal Opera House] are very important in our community, because they give the children opportunities and things to do. When I was in school, there was nothing like that around here.'

'It’s been amazing working with all of these young people. Everything on the show tonight was made by them. My job was to get their emotions and feelings out, get them to write the lyrics, to write down little stories. Obviously they were learning about Verdi’s Requiem, so they got to see that, like in opera, it’s all about expression and really deep emotions. It’s been incredible!'

RM19 is free to join and open to anyone aged 11–25 who lives, works or studies in Thurrock. For more details and to find out how you can join, please visit our website. RM19 is generously supported by the Ernest Cook Trust, Julian Metherell, the Lucille Graham Trust, Bernarr Rainbow Trust and Thurrock Borough Council.

RM19, Thurrock’s vocal group for 11 to 25-year-olds, have created a brand new work inspired by themes of the Verdi Requiem. The piece - entitled A Little Thing Called Life - will be performed at the FUSED Festival at High House Production Park on Saturday 5 July.

The group of over 70 young singers led by Artistic Director Dominic Peckham perform a wide variety of music, from classical and operatic repertoire to pop, hip-hop and gospel.

‘Creating art with young people gives them the chance to fully explore their creativity, take daring risks, try new things and know that everybody’s ideas and opinions are as valid as the next person’s. The freedom, support and encouragement that they are given allows their individual personalities and creativities to truly flourish,’ says Nick.

‘In one of the first devising sessions with RM19 we asked them the question “If you had the opportunity to tell the World one thing, what would it be?”. This question sparked conversation about what the group are passionate about and how they might convey this to an audience through words and music.’

Since the first brain-storming sessions at the start of the year, RM19 have composed and rehearsed the music, developed the staging with Jette Parker Young Artist Greg Eldridge, and designed costumes and props with Ruth Paton.

‘I am really enjoying having this team of 70 as my co-designers,’ says Ruth. ‘Watching RM19 rehearsing their new song cycle is like uncovering a colony of ants. The creative power of the group is thrilling, as is the path and course of each individual. For example, when devising staging, the group identified a scene where they felt some sort of body painting would help to express a notion of being a tribe and togetherness. We explored the idea of using hand-prints and different ways of printing onto cloth, as well as live body-painting.’

In addition to creating original music, design and drama, RM19 have planned the stage management behind the production, and developed a social media marketing strategy to document the process of staging the work.

A Little Thing Called Life will be staged at 7.30pm on Saturday 5 July as part of FUSED Festival, a three-day festival of concerts, workshops, exhibitions and activities at the High House Production Park in Thurrock. Tickets are still available.

Today, Harriet Harman made a speech at The Roundhouse about young people and the arts. Much of what Labour’s Deputy Leader (and Shadow Culture, Media and Sport Secretary) said chimed with our aims as an organization to enrich people’s lives through opera and ballet, and to enable as wide and diverse an audience as possible to enjoy our art forms.

‘I couldn’t see in the audience anyone who wasn’t like myself – white, metropolitan and middle class.’

She goes on to talk about the responsibility of publicly funded institutions to reach out to bring disadvantaged groups closer to the arts, and to ensure that people outside London have a chance to experience great art.

Lots of our audience have been commenting on the Guardian article trailing the speech - and on social media – to flag all the ways we reach out to young people and disadvantaged groups (for which, much thanks). We wanted to flag just a few of the projects we’ve been running recently:

- On stage during the very performance Harriet attended were a community ensemble composed of drama students, the homeless and the long-term unemployed. They were recruited by organizations including Streetwise Opera and many say that the experience has had a transformational effect on their lives

- This week we are putting on sale the tickets for the opening night of our 2014/15 season. The performance of Mark Anthony Turnage’s opera Anna Nicole will be available only to students and tickets will start from £1.

- Last week we held one of our regular Schools’ Matinees performances, in which over 2,000 teachers and students watched a mixed ballet programme and roared their delight after every piece. We offer schools a travel grant if they need it and 44% of the audience is from outside Greater London.

- We agree wholeheartedly with the importance of the arts in education and that’s why we are training teachers and trainee teachers so that, over the course of their career, they can inspire many thousands of young people about the arts. Our courses include this summer's Write an Opera.

- Our Youth Opera Company meets weekly and performs on the Main Stage of the ROH. Over 65% of the children taking part are from black and minority ethnic communities or non-British white backgrounds. They are terrific performers, selected entirely on merit.

- We work with companies around England to support their touring programmes and assist them in business development, so even if you haven’t visited Covent Garden you may have benefitted indirectly from the support we’ve given Stop Gap Dance or Mid Wales Opera.

Consistent investment from Arts Council England, combined with the generosity of audiences, charitable trusts and sponsors has enabled us to develop a large-scale programme of Learning and Participation work and we want to shout about it.

Harriet, do keep banging the drum for cultural entitlement, but do please also come and experience first-hand the screams of delight at a Schools' Matinee. You’d be surprised.

‘To have international visiting orchestras coming here to do this kind of performance is an unmissable opportunity,’ says Matt Lane, Head of Thurrock and Thames Gateway. ‘To have local people performing alongside world-class musicians really fits with our ethos – to create opportunities for people to engage in high-quality cultural experiences.’

Last November, the Brighton Festival Chorus, Orchestre de Picardie and L’Orchestre Symphonique de Bretagne performed the Verdi Requiem in Amiens, Compiègne and Rennes to a combined audience of over 3,600.

Jette Parker Young Artists Anush Hovhannisyan was one of four current and former members of the programme who took part in the performance.

‘I was sure that the project would be a big success but I had no idea how big,’ said Anush. ‘There were many people congratulating us after the concert, but many more came up to me the next day. It was something the audience had been looking forward to for a long time and you could see that they gained something very special from the concert.’

Both the performance in November and the forthcoming performance this July take place as part of the Royal Opera House’s involvement in ACT – A Common Territory, a European partnership between 13 different organizations. ACT supports creative and collaborative projects with local and European partners.

Previous events include Donkey Skin, a collaboration between young people from Thurrock and Southend and French dance company Eco; and Jazz Meets The Classics – Beethoven to Brubeck, a concert with young musicians from Thurrock, community choir RM19, jazz master Chris Brubeck and L’Orchestre Symphonique de Bretagne.

Verdi's Requiem will be performed on 3 and 4 July 2014. Tickets are available from the ROH Box Office on +44 (0) 20 7304 4000 with early bird offers available.